Smartermail Spam Filter

Ok, I’ve set up my content filters, but I’m still getting spam into my inbox!! Besides content filtering, what other steps can I take to thwart spam in my inbox? Now that you’ve mastered content filtering, take a look right below content filtering. There is an option for spam filtering. Using a series of weights and balances, the server will try to determine if the incoming email that you are receiving is spam and assign a weight to it. The more likely it is spam, the larger the weight attached to it. Go ahead and open your smartermail – go to settings, then click on filtering.

When you open this up, if you haven’t made any changes, you’ll see use default settings.
1. Check the box that says “Override spam settings for this account”

2. Adding your own actions.
Now you can click the actions tab. From this screen you can choose what actions are to be performed if the item is marked as spam.
By default it adds the word SPAM – Spam level (low | medium |high) to the subject line. So what you could do is set up your own filters on your email program to route those emails how you’d like them to go. Besides changing the subject line, there are other options that you can do – move to a folder or delete it. Note: you can choose to delete the email, but this is not recommended. Filters are never perfect and some good email may get deleted. Once it is deleted there is no way to recover it. “But if I move it to the junk folder it will use up all my storage space!” (Now reader, if you read last week’s post you may experience Deja Vu, so please bear with me, but if you didn’t there’s a test at the end of this article on last week’s post and you should have read it, but now it’s too late.) You can use the folder auto clean option.

3. Trusted Senders.
Do you have people who regularly email you that are definitely not spam? This is where to claim those people. Add in email addresses one per line and smartermail will know not to mark them as spam.

Folder Auto Clean
If you missed this last week, by default the mail doesn’t clean up your mail folders that are filling up, so if you have a lot of emails in the junk folder, it will be there until you run out of space. Click on “Override auto-clean settings for this account”. Now you will get an option to choose a folder. So, say for instance you changed the spam rule to be anything that is a spam rating of “SPAM Medium”, go to the junk folder. What you can do in this area is set that folder to empty by size or by date. So, go to folders – add rule. Select “Junk E-Mail” from the folder drop down, then choose the rate at which you’d like to have it emptied. Finally, check Enable auto-clean on this folder and click “Save”.

Please note that the rule will only start to the point from when it was created, so if you have junk mail that is already in there you will need to go in and manually clean out the old mail that the auto clean does not apply to.

Next week: Alias? Sounds shady to me, and setting up forwards and autoresponders.